553: His Multi-Million Dollar DTC Playbook That Launched MrBeasts Feastables | Nick Sharma

0:00Here are the stories, learn the proven methods and accelerate your growth and future through entrepreneurship. Welcome to the Founder Podcast with Nathan Chan. Nick Sharma, welcome man. As we were sharing offline, we met about 10 years ago. It's been incredible to see your journey from afar. So you started managing social media accounts for celebrities at age 15. That's how you kind of got your, I guess your foray into marketing. um how did you get into that like and why did you get started at such a young age um well first of all thanks for having me it's cool to be on the founder podcast now um so yeah i mean you know uh when i was 15 i was in high school and um all the kids around me were getting into mit and stanford and yale and princeton and uc berkeley you know all these great schools and i thought hey founder fam i want to talk to you about something super exciting We're officially partnered with OmniSend, the email marketing and SMS platform built specifically for e-commerce founders.

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1:49There's no way my grades are going to let me get into any of these schools that, you know, all these other kids are getting into. And so I thought, well, you basically go to school so that you can go to go get a good job and you get a good job so that you can support your family and send your kids to, you know, school and tennis camp and all these random things. So I thought, well, if the end game is just to make money, then I wonder if I can start making money now. And, you know, for some reason I had this thought that like if if you're famous, it's easy to make money. But I was like, I can't sing.

2:18So maybe that that's not going to happen. So then I thought, what if I can work with singers to do some of their marketing or help them on social media? Because that was something I was pretty fond of. And it started with just cold emailing random people. And some of the people I worked with early on were random SoundCloud rappers or people who had some level of following on the internet, but nothing too major. And eventually, one thing leading to the other ended up working with some larger artists and celebrities on their social media strategy and what they were posting. And, you know, me as a person is always like, I see something and I'm like, how can I do more?

2:56So then, you know, it was like, I would go into Photoshop and start designing what the posts look like and trying to figure out how we drive engagement higher. And eventually it just became me in 10th grade, you know, doing things like overseeing Twitter and Facebook and Instagram for Pitbull and Magic and a few of these other artists and it was all just a way of or it was all just a result of more curiosity I guess and things that that interested me which at the time were just kind of how social was working and and honestly a lot of the stuff you were doing back then too was so fascinating to me like the way that founder grew on social was so amazing back in those days too but you know I would just try to learn and soak up as much knowledge as I can and then you know I figured out a way to make a few thousand bucks a month when I was in high school doing that for other people.

3:43Yeah, crazy. So you've worked with people like people or Priyanka Chopra, like, like, do you have any crazy stories? And like, how like, you were just helping them build their socials and personal brands? Like, that's crazy, man. Like, do you have any crazy stories? You know, there's not a lot of crazy stories, I would say, like, the craziest thing was probably like, you know, I was, you know, 15 years old. And when our family was out at the, we used to live in San Diego when we were at the beach day, you know, everybody's sitting on the sand with a towel and I had my laptop. I was writing an audit for Pitbull's social accounts because that night I was going to go see him backstage at the concert and show it to him, you know, to see if I could work with him.

4:23There were stories like that, but not a lot of crazy stories. Most of it was, you know, in the music space, it's like, unless you're really on the touring side or like the, yeah, unless you're on the touring side, most of it's pretty routine, I would say, or kind of like at a desk. Yeah, got you. And then eventually, you started to get into direct-to-consumer and e-com. What drew you to that world? You were the director of direct-to-consumer for Hint Water. Was that kind of your first foray? We interviewed Cara a long, long time ago. But yeah, was that your first kind of foray into e-com? Yeah, well, when we met, it was you had actually interviewed my first CEO of a company called Gravity Four.

5:07Do you remember that coming to San Francisco? Yeah. And so I joined that company initially. And over there, I kind of learned the world of ad tech and how ad tech works and also how most of it's just a scam. And so because I realized so much of ad tech in the traditional sense that these companies do is a scam, I was more so drawn to the side of paid advertising on social media. So running ads on Facebook, on now Instagram, channels like that. And when I worked there, one of the things that I was responsible for was like business development and sales. And specifically with the publisher side.

5:45So I was initially working with publishers on trying to extract as much data as we can to then sell to advertisers. But the business got to a point where the only way they were like, If you can't figure out how to generate revenue from the publishers, then we don't really, your role's not going to be, there's no need for your role because we can't pay for it. And so I started working with all these publishers that they spend$100 ,000,$200 ,000 a day on Taboola and Outbrain sitting under the you may also like section of articles. And it's like, you won't believe what this celebrity looks like 27 years later in some slideshow.

6:18And so I helped these guys move to Facebook and start running a lot of their ads on Facebook, which is how I got into the world of paid advertising and just running it myself and understanding, okay, this type of creative does well, this type of copy does well, this is how you get a user to stay, et cetera. And as I was doing that, I was just working really long hours. So I was chugging Red Bull, I was chugging vitamin water, monster energy. I'd wake up and drink pre-workout. It was getting crazy at one point. And then at some point, Hint Water found its way into the office. And I just started chugging a bunch of Hint Water.

6:48And instead of drinking vitamin waters, I was just drinking Hint waters, and I just ended up drinking, you know, 12 to 15 bottles a day sometimes. And I would tweet about it and tag the brand. And because I was also early at that company, I could then say, all right, we want, you know,$3 ,000 of Hint at the office this month. And I could place the order, and they started to be like, wait a second, who is this guy ordering three grand worth of Hint online? And so that's how I initially connected with the the team at Hint and then the founder. And then, you know, fast forward to I end up leaving the sad tech company.

7:20Hint reaches out and they're like, you know, you're clearly a fan of the brand. Do you want to come and see if there's a way for us to work together? And so I go and meet the founder and she basically says, you know, I want to be famous on the internet. Help me figure out a plan for this. And, you know, that's what I got contracted to do. And then about eight or nine months into that, I ended up joining the company as the director of performance marketing. and that's how I got into Hint. And then from there, you know, the business was pretty small, but very quickly I started to see there's a few things that started to work really well.

7:52And, you know, we went from within the first three weeks I was there, we went from an average of 80 new customers a day that we were acquiring to about, you know, probably 4 ,000 or 5 ,000 new customers a day, all online, all direct to consumer. And then the two years that followed that were really like how I learned everything direct to consumer. You know, we went from spending, you know,$100 ,000 a month on Facebook to$100 ,000 a day on Facebook, adding TV, adding podcasts, influencers, you know, basically all of the main channels. And then that, of course, led to a whole rebrand. We brought the whole thing over to Shopify.

8:27The retail business started to grow. It felt like being it felt like I was taking a drug when I was on at Hint because everything I did was like it would just turn to gold and it blew up the whole business. but so that lasted a couple years and yeah on my by the time I left we were probably spending a couple million dollars a month across a ton of different channels and yeah the business had gone to a really fun place it's fun now because when I look back on when I get I still get the emails from hint their best subject lines are still the ones I wrote seven years ago their best offer on the home page is the same exact one so yeah it's cool to see yeah that's awesome so then you eventually started Sharma brands and you're pretty much like you're known or you've been called the director consumer like you're the director consumer whisperer um oh yeah the e-com whisperer like so you've worked with like feastables chamberlain coffee rock nation so a lot of brands come to you to really help them grow and scale um so what's been your most proudest achievement talk us through like how you work with brands?

9:38You know, there's a lot of like mini proud moments, I would say, but I think the, and you know, for example, launching Feastables and breaking Shopify's record of traffic and orders in 24 hours is sick. You know, launching IM8 with David Beckham recently, that was awesome. Working with Kourtney Kardashian on Lemmy, that was awesome. There's so many cool little things that happen. For me, I think the proudest one, in my opinion, is like the culture that we've built at Sharma Brands. there's this amazing culture where, you know, we've been in business now about five years and we've only had, um, I think two people leave, uh, the company ever.

10:13And, um, we just have such a tight culture at the, at the company, which has really allowed us to move extremely fast. There's also this, like the, you can rely on the fact that everybody has respect for one another. So there's never a question about it when thing, when push comes to shove or things need to be done quickly, or we need to move much faster than anticipated, which is awesome. Um, outside of that, I think, I mean, a lot of the work that we put out, in my opinion, is some of the best work in the industry just from a design and a creative standpoint. So I'm really proud of that. But we also don't sacrifice performance to get there.

10:43So a lot of our websites, you know, if you go to like David Protein, that's a brand that just launched recently. You know, it looks beautiful. And however, we don't sacrifice performance to get there. It converts at an astronomical conversion rate compared to most e-commerce sites. but I would say proudest moment is probably like just just seeing our culture here and the team and the fact that anytime we've done a survey to our clients or internally the number one feedback is always the team is a one yeah that's cool man and I got to ask you the question right like we got to talk into some of these numbers so like when you do have a brand like Feastables because there is so much trust already built like the conversion rates must be astronomical because it's just so warm can you talk us through some of those numbers like you said that you guys broke shopify when you launched feastables what does that mean yeah we we broke records in terms of number of orders for a new brand in 24 hours and um the traffic driven to the site.

11:52And that's obviously, you know, Mr. Beast is probably the most famous, if not one of the top three, four most famous people in the world. But you bring up an interesting point, which is trust. And that's something that so many brands today don't factor. They, you know, previously, like when you launched a brand online, whether it's a service business, a course business, an info products business, or a consumer brand, you could run some ads and very quickly see the ads working. Today it's like if you launch something and you don't have that trust or that social proof or the ability for somebody to go on TikTok and search about it and find information, you know, find somebody else talking about what they like and they don't like or the fact that there's no Reddit threads that go in and talk deep about what people like or don't like about it, your conversion rate ends up to be much lower.

12:37Your cost of customer acquisition as a result ends up being much higher. Whereas if you have a brand where, you know, let's say you have somebody who's a public figure who's constantly talking about the product or preaching the science behind it or just calling out its competitors, the cost of advertising. See, advertising is just basically taking something and putting it in front of more eyeballs. And if you put something in front of more eyeballs, if you're paying a lot for a customer, it means that out of the people you're showing it to, there's just less of those people who decide to buy. If you're paying a lower cost of customer acquisition, it means that for even the smaller group of people you show it to, there's a higher percentage those people who are deciding to buy.

13:15And we just did an analysis recently across three supplement brands that we've worked with this year. And brand A is a, I wouldn't call this person a celebrity, but very outspoken person, constantly posting content on a daily basis. The person themself is the one posting all the content and very vocal about the products and what's in it and why competitors are bad. The second one is a relatively actually super famous, you could say scientist behind the brand, and created the product. The products are phenomenal products, but not super outspoken. They have some media platforms and a good amount of followers, but they're not creating content on a daily basis in an aggressive way.

13:58And then brand number three is a world-famous celebrity who's launched a protein product, but is never posting. Maybe post once a month, but has that world-famous celebrity face. Brand A makes$20 for every dollar invested in ads. Brand B makes a dollar for every dollar invested in ads. And brand C, with the world-famous person, makes 70 cents. And it just kind of goes to show, like, the more content you put out, not only are you acquiring customers through the content you put out, but you're building an insane amount of trust by putting out so much content. It's like, you're basically telling people you've got nothing to hide.

14:34And you're also generating a ton of awareness as a byproduct. And so all of that factors into things like conversion rate, you know, or even cost of customer acquisition. Basically what you don't do in content you create, you end up paying for in paid advertising. Yeah. That's a, that's, that's an awesome story and an awesome lesson for anyone watching that's working on their e-commerce brand just about to launch or is in you know the early stages or trying to grow their brand so the next question that they're going to ask is like okay I've got an e-com brand I'm not famous I want to put out content what kind of content should people be putting out do you have a framework that you can share yeah there's something I call the broke man's content playbook.

15:21And essentially, it's just, you know, there's so many social platforms that reward good content, right? Reels, shorts, TikTok, even LinkedIn now rewards good video content, for example, or X. And, you know, if you're, I call it the broke man's content playbook, because this is assuming you've got, you know, barely any money to play with. and so what I would do if I had a protein company and I was just coming to market, I would just start creating a bunch of content with my iPhone, just front face camera, record stuff. You know, I would basically answer, I would make a list of about 45 questions somebody would have when they're deciding whether or not they want to buy my product.

16:00So what's in it? Where are the ingredients source from? Why is this one better than a competitor? How does this one compare to the leading brand on the market? How does this compare price-wise? How does it compare, you know, what about some of the specific ingredients? Teach me about these different ingredient words on the label. Basically, all these things that could be turned into content, call it questions, you basically answer them in videos and start posting them. Very quickly, you'll start to understand the type of content, the format, the way that the videos start or get going that do well for engagement.

16:32And then basically, whatever does well there, you port those over and turn them into ads. So the idea is that you're creating, you're not just making a bunch of ads and then testing them in the paid side, you're creating a bunch of content, you're testing it organically because it's free and then whatever does well, then you port that over to the paid side that continue to scale that up from there. Yeah, and when it comes to, I guess, you know, paid advertising, you spend a lot of money for brands. Would you say it's 80 % creative at this point? Yeah, I mean, there's, I'd say it's probably, yeah, I'd say it's like 80 % creative, 10 % account structure, and 10 % measurement.

17:12If you're not measuring properly, it's hard to understand what you're doing with account structure or deciding what type of creative is working best. But majority of platforms now operate as the TikTok for you page. So if you think about Instagram five years ago, you basically see who you're following. TikTok made that different and said, we don't care who you're following. We're just going to keep serving you content based on what we believe you're going to resonate with. and that same concept of content delivery, algorithmic content delivery, has now moved to the ad side, where on TikTok they call it TikTok smart campaigns, on Google they call it performance max, on Facebook they call it advantage shopping or advantage plus campaigns.

17:54And essentially what you do is you're basically feeding the creative, all the creative that you make, you feed it into these platforms and you sort of let the platforms tell you and figure out what works best and where in the customer journey. but for the most part creative is in my opinion the targeting if you have a creative of a guy that looks like me you're gonna start to reach more people that look like me if you have a creative of a you know 22 year old woman you're gonna start to reach women who look 22 or feel 22 and so creative is absolutely like the variable for targeting in fact most ad platforms you don't even choose targeting anymore you serve it creative so it understands what is in the actual creative.

18:32And then it also knows who is purchasing on your website, who's most engaged with your products or your ads. And it uses both of those pieces of information to decide who to serve the ads to. So you believe the brand should be focusing if they're in the early stages on creating content organically, broke person's content playbook, and then just play around on the platforms, TikTok, Instagram, some form of reels video, right? Not static. Are you hesitating to take the next step in your e-commerce journey? Founder Plus has you covered. With proven frameworks tailored to your business needs for fast results, a supportive community of over 30 ,000 like-minded entrepreneurs and weekly live mentorship sessions, Founder Plus is your key to success.

19:16Try Founder Plus today for just$1 for seven days and start building your dream business with confidence. You can visit founder.com forward slash start dollar trial or click the link in the description to claim your trial. 100%. Literally. Absolutely. 100%. I think, yeah, I would say definitely focus on the Brokeman's content playbook. That gives you a really good understanding to know what's going to work and what's not going to work. It'll probably save you a few thousand bucks on testing that with ads. I do think statics are worth testing. They're very easy to create, especially if you create a template inside Figma or Canva or one of these tools that are free to use.

19:52Then, you know, once you find a template that works, that one template, you can swap the copy out and test, you know, 100 different versions of angles or hooks or things of that nature. Statics can also be cheaper to run. They're usually sometimes, you know, a third the cost of running a video in terms of CPM. Although you may not, you may also have less engagement. So sometimes it's not fully worth it. But yeah, I would basically focus on creating a bunch of organic content and then maybe testing some light statics. Yep, got you. And founder-led, right? Like face to camera, a lot of it with the founder of the brand, right?

20:25or UGC like or combination? Yeah. The founder stuff does extremely well. You know, if you're a founder and you're using the founder's Instagram account or Facebook page, that stuff tends to do the best. I mean, that's how earlier when I was mentioning we went from 80 customers to 5 ,000 customers a day. That was using an advertorial where we were talking about the founder story and I was running all these from a whitelisted, from the founder's pages as a whitelisted ad. What that does is, one, it increases the trust because it's not coming from a corporation. It's coming from another human. So in the feed, the trust is much higher.

21:03Two, it increases the click-through rate and inversely decreases the cost per click because, again, the trust factor is there. But three is, you know, one of the biggest things that people don't do when they run ads is respond to every single comment. And when you respond to comments from the founder's page versus just from the company, you know, saying, blah, blah, blah, you know, email us here or send us a DM, it just makes it so much more it brings that human experience alive which of course makes the ad work so much better but the founder ad works extremely well you know I'm surprised more people don't do it it's free to do and would you rather pay you know a few creators thousands of dollars or you know you can just set your iPhone up you have one of the greatest cameras in the world right here and you can immediately set it up and get going yeah I look I agree I think it's just difficult for people right like it's scary people like it's scary to put your face in front of the camera to you know create this content and say this is who i am this is what i'm creating and and um yeah do you do you recommend what's that is um totally one of my tips from that by the way is um i was gonna say one of my tips for that is if you if you have somebody uh who you work with sort of treat it like um you can do two things one is you can do something like this where you set you sit two people down on like a Zoom and you just ask questions and you know you record this and then you take clips from this and turn those into what those ads could be.

22:25The second version is you just get somebody to grab their phone and hold it up and just start asking you questions and so it doesn't then feel like you're talking to a lens because that's the part that people I think tend to freeze up on is like alright I'm staring at something blank and now I have to pretend like I'm having a two-way conversation but you know if you have a friend who you who can interview you by holding up the camera another good one is like if you've got you know i'm sure you've seen those podcast style ads where people are discussing something over a podcast you know those crush and those are so easy to film um and so uh so yeah there's different ways to do it but it is intimidating i think once people do i always say once you do seven of them your eighth one is going to be much better yeah i think it's it's funny you talk about that i remember in the early days when i was starting the podcast i found it easy to interview people but when I had to record the intro to the show I couldn't I couldn't I really struggled to do it because I was in a room speaking to a microphone by myself and I asked a friend that was like a podcaster for a long time I was like how do you do that and he's like oh it's funny you ask because I never really thought that like this is something that I had to learn just getting comfortable speaking into a microphone by myself so I can see yeah exactly why because I I can see exactly why people would find that difficult.

23:39Same thing. So when it comes to growth for a new director consumer brand, you talked about content. What are the other things that people need to be doing when it comes to growing an e-com brand? You talked about trust. What are some other things? You talked about content, using content to build trust. But that takes time, right? That's take time. like what what like and it takes a while to understand the creative side of things and getting all that going if you weren't wanting to grow a brand and you're bootstrapping it what would you do the the biggest thing that a lot of people well i wouldn't say a lot of people but many people will skip over is making sure that whatever you are selling is addressing a real problem so for example if you were to launch a um you know um if you were to launch a pasta brand right?

24:32And you said, well, I'm going to just make the tastiest pasta and I feel like I can make it better and it'll be much cooler and whatnot. The problem is that you're going into a category without some sort of a competitive edge. The competitive edge usually comes from solving a problem differently or figuring out how you are better than whatever else is on the market. A good example is like if you've heard, there's a shampoo brand called K18 and they bring some innovation in the technology of the actual shampoo. Or what's another good example? Basically, any sort of innovation or things that make something better or they do things differently, those are great.

25:10Anything that solves a real problem, for example, a moisturizer on somebody's hand moisturizer probably won't do as well as a cream that's going to solve people's itchy feet problem, because you're addressing a real problem that people have versus something that's sort of nice to have. So that's one thing that I think that should always be addressed is like, what is the thing that's actually being solved here? Or how is somebody's life going to be better as a result of this? If that question can't be answered, then a lot of times your product is likely not recession proof, meaning that the second people have to cut back on expenses, you're in that category of discretionary spending versus something that you must buy.

25:45If your feet get itchy and recession comes, you're still going to make sure your feet aren't itchy, but you're not going care to get some sort of a gel that makes your nails shinier on top. So that's one, it's making sure that you have a good product solution. The second one is making sure that you have a way to cut through the noise. If you take the lazy way of launching a brand and take the font from one brand, the colors from another brand, you sort of create some ambiguous branding message, it's very hard to cut through the noise because you don't have sort of a unique way to approach it. But if you take a brand like Jolie, have you seen that brand Jolie?

26:19It's a filtered shower head. Jolie is a great example where Jolie is a filtered shower head, but it's never described as that. It's more so described as a beauty tool or a beauty device. And that's the reason that they're able to sell. They've sort of created this formula that resonates with people, which is if you use Jolie and take a shower, your hair will be beautiful because of our filter. If you stop subscribing, your hair is going to go back to normal. And it's all in the positioning and the massaging of how they do it. If you compare that to any of the competitors Jolie has, they're running at 50 % off because they can't get anybody to buy their filtered shower head.

26:55No one cares to buy a filtered shower head. They care to buy this beauty tool that's going to help their skin and become their step zero for their skincare. So anyways, problem solution, some sort of good branding and messaging. And then you also need to make sure the product actually delivers. There's a lot of products that people buy that have great marketing, really high, great funnels on their website, nice landing pages, good creative, but the product is just garbage. And it doesn't deliver on the promise. It might be a sleep gummy, but it doesn't really help you sleep. It's more so feeling like a placebo or it might be a whatever it may be.

27:26So problem solution, good branding and messaging or positioning and making sure the product actually works. If you have those three, you can almost sell anything. Then the content is really easy because it's easy to create content when something works or when something solves somebody's problem or or makes their life better. It's easy to build landing pages, because there's a lot to talk about. And yeah, I feel like the first three are the things that most people don't have. But they tend to have really good websites, or really nice creative, or really beautiful branding. And then they have this issue where they have the first couple of days of sales that are great, because friends and family are excited to purchase.